I loved this article about Stephanie Rosalia's attempts to teach students information literacy. At a time when many public school librarian's jobs are being cut, she has clearly demonstrated the extremely vital role that they can fulfill, sharpening student's abilities to both find accurate information using web-based resources, and also encouraging them to read, in any format.
We didn't have internet at the inner-city school where I began teaching 22 years ago, nor did we have much of a library, but everyone seemed to have a television at home. My students were all fob (fresh off the boat) immigrants who spoke little to no English; many were not literate in their own language. In order to motivate them to learn to read, speak, and someday write in English, I would challenge them to watch a TV program in English, preferably with the closed captioning on (if I could get that concept across to them). Part of the challenge was that I would watch a program in Spanish. On Fridays, we would act out what we had watched (inappropriate scenes excepted!), and talk about the new vocabulary it had introduced. It was a lot of fun dramatizing, and helped them to begin to break through some of the language barriers that they were facing.
From this experience, I learned that technology can be a very powerful tool in a teacher's toolbox. It isn't the classical way to learn (every teacher dreams of that student who walks into the library, begins reading, and can't put the book down! :), but it is appealing to the masses. It gets them started.
So, kudos to Ms. Rosalia. I only wish that her description of a school librarian as an "information literacy teacher" could be mandated and implemented nation-wide, but as the article pointed out, most schools are cutting their librarians. My daughter's large middle school cut the sole remaining school librarian last year, moving her into the school secretary's position (!). At the same time, they quit using printed textbooks and went to an all-digital platform, changed webpage providers, and instigated google drive as the primary spot for turning in assignments, getting school-related e-mails, etc. It was a MESS, and let me tell you, I for one wanted to shake someone until their heads snapped off. (Sorry, little mommy bear reaction here.) They never did get the website running correctly, so we could often not find what we needed for homework, and the math teacher simply stated that as he was retiring that year, he would not be using any of the technology available (including e-mail). More than once, a teacher insisted that a particular assignment had to be done in a particular program (ie a presentation), that was not only unavailable for the Mac platform (which is all we have at home), but it was so outdated that even my sister's Windows laptop could not use it! They needed an information literacy teacher for the teachers!
Sorry for the rant. Coming from a private international school where they had a dedicated IT department, beautiful libraries (one for elementary, one for high school, and one for middle school), all fully staffed with professional Master's level librarians, all-digital textbooks, and required students to begin using their own flashdrives in the third grade, it was quite a shock to experience the lack of technological competence in the U.S. public schools. I hope this year is better - but I'm not holding my breath, since all students in her grade level are supposed to be getting netbooks. sigh.
Maybe Ms. Rosalia would like to move to the midwest and work for free.....:)
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